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Cannonball – Enhance Sega Outrun Engine.

It might be cold, grey and damp out there today but inside it warm and full of the joys of summer with clear blue skies, big fluffly white clouds and three tropical soundtracks. Yup, Outrun is back and and this time, thanks to coder DJYT, a new game engine has been released called ‘Cannonball’. Using the original roms Cannaball has many enhancements and improvements over the original and can also used to run Outrun at a very impressive 60 frames per second 😮

I had issues getting it to run at first but then noticed that Cannonball calls for an Outrun Rom file called ‘epr-10381a.132’ which is not in the revision B Rom set. Either rename the file to epr-10381b.132 or copy the rom file from Revision A set.

Game Controls are as follow –

Cursors: Steering

Z: Accelerate

X: Brake

Space: Gear Change

5: Insert Coin

1: Start

F1: Pause

F2: Advance a frame when paused

F3: Toggle/Freeze timer

At first I thought, yeah it looks pretty impressive and smooth at 60 fps but it wasn’t until I switched back to the original 30 fps did I notice that how MUCH of a difference the enhanced version looks. Play, for example the first (left) path to get to the area with the overhead stone structures…it looks flippin awesome, you won’t go back to Mame again for your Outrun fix 🙂

Woot woot, party time!

Still shots won’t show how smooth this looks at 60fps but I highly recommend running two version of Cannonball configured at both 30 and 60 fps. Pause both (F1) and run them together.

My desktop – 60fps on the left, 30fps on the right….or it it the other way around 😉

At the moment there’s isn’t a frontend menu system for the game so for example, if you wish to change the graphics properties and other game options you will need to do this by editing the games config file with notepad or similar.

I’ve found that if you select the fullscreen toggle, the audio is effected slightly, therefore I prefer to run Cannonball in Windowed mode but set the scaler mode to either 3 or 4.